After playing in army bands while in the US army, the Louisiana singer gave up on music. Now, with the help of the Black Keys’ Dan Auerbach, the 63-year-old is finally ready for stardom
If the Vietnam war had not come to an end, Robert Finley might not have released this year’s best classic R&B album.
Finley, from rural Louisiana, joined the US army aged 19 in 1974. His father had been killed in a car crash a couple of years before, and he needed to help support his mother and get himself an education. “They say when you grew up as a sharecropper you have to pick cotton when cotton need picking and chop cotton when cotton need chopping and you go to school in between, so we really only got to go to school three months out of a year,” he says. He trained in aircraft weapons maintenance, but by the time he was deployed, the war was winding down and he added another specialism to his army duties – entertainment.
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